The break in the wall took a little more doing.
Riley worked most of the day yesterday, with materials purchased from a hardware store ten miles away, and by the time he was done the loose dirt was packed back in place and the opening covered with bricks, and mortar, and a layer of block bond over top of that. If anyone else was buried back there, they weren’t getting out.
Which was just fine as far as Katie was concerned.
Of course, Trooper Leon Moresby was still promising to come back with that ground penetrating radar device of his and see what else might be hiding behind the walls. Katie was planning on telling him thanks, but no thanks, if he ever brought it up again.
The dead were better off staying that way.
Katie sipped at her coffee. It was cold now, and bitter, and she didn’t care. She was drinking the whole thing, and loading herself up on caffeine, and then she might be ready to face a day of running the Inn that she had bought, sight unseen.
“Why do you think the cross worked?” Riley asked her abruptly.
The question took her off guard. Not that she hadn’t been thinking about that very thing for the last few days, but she had thought the question was hers alone.
Why did the cross work for her, and send Boris Vykroft to Hell?
The cross was a religious image. It had deep meaning to anyone who attended church every weekend, or wore rosary beads, or who thought Christ was the savior and God watched over everyone.
Katie believed there was a God, probably, but she wasn’t very religious. The last time she’d set foot in a church had been years ago and that had been for a friend’s wedding. She didn’t pray regularly, she didn’t cross herself whenever someone mentioned Mary Magdalene, or anything like that. She didn’t even know the name of the current Pope. So why would she be able to use a little wooden cross dropped from the hand of a flawed pastor to repel a ghoul from her basement?
That was a very good question. Apparently, Riley had been wondering the same.
“I’m not sure,” she answered honestly. “Maybe it was Brent’s faith that made it powerful. Maybe Boris had become so evil in death that just the symbolism of the Christian faith was enough to destroy him. I really don’t know. What do you think?”
“I think you’re making this up as you go along,” he chuckled. “Just like Brent was dong down in the basement.”
“Sure, and look where that got him.”
He gave her a look. “It worked for you, Katie Pearson, and that’s going to have to be good enough for me because I have a feeling that neither of us has any idea why it worked.”
“Nope.” Katie shoved her hand into the pocket of her pants and came out with a little-shaped piece of metal. It flashed in the kitchen lights. “But I know this. I’m not going anywhere without this ever again.”
She put the cross on the table between them. Four inches long, two inches wide, silver and shiny. It had been a necklace until yesterday when she took the chain out of the loop and began carrying it in her pocket. Her hand must have gone to her pocket a hundred times already just to make sure it was still there.
Riley held her gaze for a long moment, and then she watched him reach into his own pocket, and put something of his own down on the top of the table.
A cross.
His was made of two pieces of wood, rough and uneven, held together with a crisscrossed piece of wire around the middle.
“I made it from pieces of the church where I was breaking it apart so it would...you know. Fall. I figured it was a fitting tribute to Brent if I carried a piece of him with us to protect us from evil.”
They were so alike, Katie thought to herself with a smile. She couldn’t think of anyone she would want by her side when a ghost decided to crawl out of their basement wall more than she wanted Riley. Certainly not those hare-brained paranormal investigators who had been staying at the Inn for the last few days.
Well. Their credit cards had cleared so they could stay here anytime they wanted to, but that still didn’t mean she would trust them to catch a mouse, let alone a ghost.
She just wished that she knew what had drawn out the ghosts of Boris and Anna Vykroft in the first place. After everything at the Inn had gone quiet for so long, what had woken them up now?
On his side of the table, Riley rubbed his knuckles. The scabs were mostly healed from where he had cut them open against the pipes in room four a few days ago. She didn’t feel bad for him, considering that he’d bled all over the Inn when he did it. He must have cleaned it all up, because when she went to do it, the blood was gone.
Either way she was glad to see his hand was healing, but he was a grown man. He could take a little blood. Especially if she was one big bruise from shoulder to shin. Those shelves in the basement had to go.
When he noticed her watching him, he grabbed his cross and put his hands below the table, pretending nothing was wrong. “I’m fine.”
“Yes,” she teased, “you are.”
“Yeah?”
“Oh yeah. I might want to tear your clothes off right now and admire how fine you are.”
His smile lit up his eyes. “I think we could make that happen. As for the ghosts in our Inn...I’m still going to keep this cross close, like you said. I’m hoping that whatever worked in the basement this time will work next time, too.”
“Oh?” Katie cocked an eyebrow at him. “You think there’s going to be a next time?”
Standing up from his chair, coming around to her side of the table, he wrapped his arms around her neck and kissed the top of her head.
“I’m sure of it,” he said. “Whenever you’re around, Katie Pearson, there will always be more ghost stories to tell.”
Chapter 28
The cemetery in the middle of Twilight Ridge was where witches were buried. Empty graves marked the death of an evil man who had set half the town on fire because of a deep hatred of his wife. Others buried there had stories just as evil and frightening to tell.
The Merimack County Cemetery was where everyone else from town got buried when they died.
Katie and Riley didn’t attend the burial of Reverend Brent Keller. Katie knew she wouldn’t be able to hold it together. Not after what had happened, and what they had done. She knew that it would take a better actress than she was to make that okay.
It was simply what had to be done. She knew Brent Keller would have approved. He was a broken man, long before the ghosts of the Heritage Inn had broken him. In the end, she believed, he had found some redemption.
The night was dark in that cemetery after the mourners had left, and the earth was piled over the coffin and tamped down by the groundskeepers. It was so dark, in fact, that no one saw the little boy walk up to the grave.
Brent Keller. Date of birth. Date of death.
The World Has Lost A Light.
The boy put his hand on the stone and let it linger there. The moonlight shone through him, and cast no shadow.
Brent had never described the boy to Katie. He’d been very drunk the night his car took a young child’s life. He didn’t get to see the unruly blonde hair, or the dimple, or how his smile used to light up his mother’s world.
The boy ran his fingers along the rounded edge of the gravestone. He sat there for a very long time.
Then he spoke, in a voice that was stolen away by the wind.
“I forgive you.”
The Haunting Deep
Dedicated to Paula & Jim
Chapter 1
There was something about the air in New Hampshire.
From that first day when she had accidentally stopped into a little town named Twilight Ridge, Katie Pearson had noticed the difference in the air. She was from way out West, and she was used to travelling around places like Montana and Colorado and the Dakotas. There were places out there that were all open sky and distant mountains. Running streams. Fresh breezes. But for the most part, her travels had all been in cities where the air was choked with car exhaust and the crush o
f humanity.
Twilight Ridge was different.
There were cities in New Hampshire, too. She’d found that out soon enough. Just about every major service that she needed, whether it was the hospital or a good steak house, meant driving an hour away to get to those cities. Here in Twilight Ridge, life was slower. Simpler. The small community was surrounded by trees and a flowing river that powered the grist mill. There was grass and there were hills and just like the rest of New Hampshire there were spaces filled with nothing but nature.
Even all of that couldn’t explain the difference in the way the air smelled and tasted and felt in Katie’s lungs. It was just cleaner living. That was all there was to it.
She was glad that she’d started a new business here. At least, now that things had settled down, she was glad about it. Things were almost normal again. It had been a full month since the dead bodies had been found in her walls down cellar, and the ghosts attached to them forcibly removed from the premises.
‘Down cellar’ was a phrase they used up here in New England. It meant the basement, of course, but saying it that way just had a homier feel to it.
There was another word that Katie had heard a lot since coming here. Ghosts. That word meant the same thing in anybody’s vernacular.
Fear and terror.
Katie frowned at herself as she went over the check-ins expected through this week. She was blessed--or maybe cursed--with the ability to see ghosts. It came in handy here at the Heritage Inn. Her new business was absolutely infested with ghosts.
So was the town of Twilight Ridge.
It was one of the things that drew people to stay here. At first she’d been disgusted by the internet blogs about her haunted Inn, but then she’d realized that business was business, regardless of where it came from. If people wanted to stay here to be scared, then it was money in her pocket. If intrepid ghost hunters who never, ever found a single ghost wanted to stay here and take pictures and record sounds of people snoring, then she would laugh all the way to the bank with their checks.
Yes, there were ghosts here. They came and went, and right now they were gone. There hadn’t been a single knock on the walls or a shadowy figure in a corner since the bodies had been removed from downstairs.
Good riddance.
Katie went to bed every night hoping their absence meant they were gone for good, but she wasn’t so sure. The dead seemed to be attracted to her. Maybe it was her perfume.
She laughed at her little joke. Yes, she wore perfume, but not a lot. She didn’t need it to be pretty. She was five-foot-eight with long, raven-black hair and hazel eyes and expressive lips. She wore makeup for fun, just like she wore her dangly earrings for fun.
The silver cross that she carried in her pocket wasn’t for show. That was there because sometimes a girl needed a special kind of protection. It didn’t make her pretty. It made her practical.
After all, she wasn’t trying to attract anyone new with a spritz of L’eau Number Six in the mornings. She already had a boyfriend. Riley Harris, contractor extraordinaire, and Katie Pearson, house hunter. They made a good team. It was more than that though. He loved her, just the way she was, even down to the little birthmark on her left ass cheek that he would playfully kiss deep in the night when they were supposed to be sleeping...
She gave herself a moment to remember the events of last night, up in their room, when Riley had used those amazing hands of his to relax the muscles in her shoulders and excite every other part of her.
Then she went back to work.
Everything was set. All of the rooms weren’t rented out between now and Friday, but most of them were. She and Riley were going to be busy. She liked being busy. It meant that this whole crazy idea of trying to make a go of it as an Innkeeper might actually pay off.
She had made her living from flipping houses for years. She understood all the little things that went into buying a neglected property and then sprucing it up and then selling it for much more than she had put into it. Not only did she understand that business, but she was good at it. It was what she knew.
Buying this Inn and not selling it...this had been something new altogether, for both Riley and her.
The plan was to get the Heritage Inn set up and operating on its own, hire someone to run the place for her, and then step back while it made money and she went back to doing what she did best. Flipping houses gave her a freedom that few other jobs would. She could travel from state to state, and not be tied down anywhere, make her own hours, do her own thing.
That was what she liked best about it. In fact, until she’d met Riley and Melanie she only had a few close friends. Everyone else was either a business associate or a stranger, really.
Now she had Riley, plus the entire town of Twilight Ridge.
Speaking of which, it would be nice to go out for a walk. It was November now in New Hampshire, and soon enough the really cold weather was going to start flying in. While they still had a few warm days like this one, she was going to take advantage of them.
Of course, warm was relative in New Hampshire. The temperature today was in the sixties. That meant a sweater for her and a light jacket to boot. That was something else they said in New Hampshire. ‘To boot.’ Katie was pretty sure it just meant ‘also.’ She was trying to pick up little sayings like that. Like ‘from away’ which meant someone not from New England. Just like Katie.
Back out West, in parts of California and Nevada, the weather was still in the eighties. Well, they might have the heat, but New Hampshire had the friendly people and the changing leaves and the smell of the crisp air that promised snow by next month.
She scribbled out a note for Riley, leaving it on the front desk where he was sure to find it. One of the things with running an Inn was you couldn’t just up and leave the place to itself. You had to have someone here in case a guest wanted something, and there was breakfast and lunch to make for them too--although they were on their own for dinner.
Right now, the place was empty. It happened sometime, when there was no overlap between guests leaving and guests coming in. She’d learned not to worry about it. Tomorrow there were two guests checking in. The day after there were two more, staying in one room together. They only had four to rent out upstairs, and then her and Riley’s bigger room at the end of the hall. It was going to make the place busy, but like she’d said. Busy was good.
Busy was money.
“Okay,” she said out loud to the empty front room of her Inn. “I’m going out now. If there are any ghosts hanging around I would appreciate it if you didn’t break anything or burn my place down while I’m gone. Deal?”
The silence was her only answer.
That was going to have to be good enough for now.
Chapter 2
There were any number of short side streets in the town of Twilight Ridge. Nestled in the forest like it was, off a main road, it was a small community where everyone knew everyone else. A person could walk from one end of the place to the other in less than an hour. Katie knew that for a fact, because she’d done it herself.
She let her feet wander, and they took her in no direction in particular. She found herself walking away from where the church had fallen down on itself a month ago, but she decided that was just a coincidence. Yes, she still felt guilty about the way she and Riley had faked that destruction to cover up the truth, but it really had been the only way.
Doing a bad thing to get a good result. She wondered if the people of New Hampshire had a word for that?
Leaving that chapter of her life in the past, again, she set out into a little corner of the town that was all residential housing. She smiled at the sun, and at the faces of people going by. Some of them waved a greeting, or nodded in recognition.
One of them ran up to her and stopped her. “Hey, I was just thinking about you.”
Katie smiled at Heather Donahue. She was one of the people who Katie counted as being almost friends. She had two kids, and worked as
a tax preparer, and she had been asking Katie to join a local woman’s group for wives. Katie had pointed out that she wasn’t a wife, technically, but that didn’t seem to matter. Heather just wanted Katie to join for her company.
Heather was a tall and slender woman, almost elegant, and she looked as out of place in a town like this as the Queen of England would have. She wasn’t rich, or at least Katie didn’t think she was, but she had that sort of bearing about her.
“So,” Heather asked. “Have you given any more thought to our little group.”
“I have,” Katie answered, although that wasn’t quite true. “I think I might try to come to a meeting. You said every Friday?”
“Oh, wonderful!” Heather said, which as far as Katie could tell was the woman’s favorite word. “Yes, there’s one this Friday. I’ll drop off the details to the Inn when I have the chance. You won’t be disappointed. Can we count on you to bring a snack tray to pass around? Okay, then we’ll see you there!”
Katie felt like she’d been caught up in a whirlwind. The way Heather spun through her day must be exhausting. She didn’t seem to stand still for more than a minute or two at a time. Katie found she was actually looking forward to this little get together. It might be a lot of fun.
She went back to her wandering. She liked to walk through this part of town, to look at the old houses and play what-if games like, what if they put a new roof on that house? What if they landscaped that yard? What if they paved that driveway and trimmed those bushes and gave the whole thing new siding...how much would the house be worth?
It kept her in practice for when she would inevitably go back to flipping houses. She had no intention of going soft here in this wonderfully remote part of the world. Plus, it was just fun. Ooh, there was a house with original molding and an amazing front porch. That could go for six figures right now, as it was, with no effort. If they repaired the chimney and maybe attached the garage to the home, then it might go as high as--
Sight Unseen Complete Series Box Set Page 60
